


Homecoming

by Sholio



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Episode Tag, Family, Gen, Team, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 00:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8555368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: 3x03 missing scene. S.TA.R. Labs greets some old friends.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I had to rewatch 3x03 a couple of times carefully (SUCH A HARDSHIP) before deciding that the second speed lab scene takes place the next day, if not later -- everyone is dressed differently, and it's daytime where it was night before. So this is the intervening night.

Jesse stumbled when she came off the track. She didn't think anyone would notice, but this was Dad, so of _course_ he noticed, or so she gathered from the sharp "Honey!" that echoed down the open interior of the speed lab. 

"I'm fine." She quickly took her hand away from her forehead, but her dad could be pretty fast himself when he wanted to be. He caught her and helped her sit down, one arm around her shoulders, rubbing soothingly in that awkward way that was somehow even more comforting because she knew it didn't come easily to him.

And, being Dad, he was muttering to himself. "Right, food -- your caloric intake is going to be through the roof, if Barry is anything to go by -- which was my mistake, we need to find you something to eat. It's about ... oh." 

Jesse raised her aching head to find her dad looking with alarm at the digital clock on the wall, which was reading close to midnight. She had a dazed moment when she thought she must have been running for a _lot_ longer than she was aware of, before she realized ...

"Time difference," they both said at once, followed by her dad's, "That's interesting, there wasn't that much time slippage before. I'm going to place a bet it's because of Allen going back in time. Are the timelines of the two earths fixed with respect to each other? This could have interesting repercussions when we go back --"

"Dad," she complained, rubbing her temple again. "I don't care if it's seventeen o'clock or the middle of the night. I just want -- _food ..."_

She'd just become aware that they were alone in the speed lab. The others had all vanished. "Where'd everybody go?" she asked as her dad helped her to her feet.

"I don't know," he said, and huffed a soft laugh. "Home, probably."

As if on cue, Cisco poked his head into the lab. "Hey, there's pizza. Anybody hungry?"

***

Boxes of pizza were spread out, open, on a couple of lab tables along the side of the medbay when they trooped in. Most of the others were there -- Barry and Caitlin and Iris and Joe. Wally wasn't, but the presence of food (and pizza, at least, seemed to be more or less the same between universes) helped to curb Jesse's disappointment as well as her appetite.

She perched on the edge of a medbay examining table, feet tucked up, and munched on slices of pizza and bread rolls from a paper plate. The tiredness was catching up with her; she hadn't yet told her dad how much running could take out of her, because it was hard enough getting him to let her run in the first place.

But he was hardly hovering at all right now -- a sign, Jesse knew, of his subconscious assumption that she was safe here, not that she ever expected him to realize it. Tired, and more comfortable in this familiar-unfamiliar place than she'd expected after months at home on her own Earth, she perched on her exam table and watched her dad's relaxed posture as he gestured vigorously with a slice of pizza while trying to explain something to Cisco and Barry. Caitlin was talking with Iris and Joe, sitting on stools around a table where they'd claimed their own pizza box.

There was a part of Jesse that almost wanted to be jealous, in a way. For years, she was the only person who'd ever seen her dad like this: not the CEO of S.T.A.R. Labs, not the technology mogul, not even the wild-eyed and wild-haired stereotype of the mad scientist that the press occasionally managed to capture on video ... but a regular guy with greasy fingers, pizza slice in one hand and coffee cup in the other, trying to demonstrate some theoretical concept while Barry looked on the verge of laughter and hovered as if he was prepared to catch any falling object with his speed. Her dad looked relaxed and comfortable, and she was intrigued and a little startled at how readily he'd slipped back into the easy comfort he had somehow managed to achieve with these people.

She claimed another slice of pizza, realizing that she had eaten a whole pie all by herself. Weird. Biochem equations rolled through her head regarding her own metabolism, but mostly she was comfortably full and tired. She flopped back on the table. The lightly padded surface was too firm to be really comfortable, and the bright lights were annoying, but if she closed her eyes --

"Hey, Wells," she heard Joe say. "You got a sleeping kid there."

Jesse cracked her eyes open as shadows fell over her. "I'm not asleep." Although she felt like she would be soon. Even if it was only late afternoon on their Earth, it felt like the middle of the night.

"Yeah, that raises a question," her dad began, and Jesse turned her head to see him duck his head in a way that managed to be defiant and vaguely self-deprecating at the same time. "I'm aware that we dropped in on you without a word. At the same time --"

"Harry, stop." Caitlin caught his arm, snugging herself up against his side to look up at him and grin at his obvious startlement. "You really think we don't have a place for you two to sleep?"

"Yeah, so we were thinking it made the most sense to put you in your old room," Cisco explained. "It wasn't like we were doing anything with it, we actually hadn't put anything in there since you left for ... reasons. Perfectly valid reasons. Caitlin, help me out here --"

"I think we should all go to bed," Iris inserted diplomatically, while Caitlin just grinned and hung onto Harry's arm.

Joe gave Jesse a hand off the exam table, and she smiled at him. They had been gone for months, but it was still so easy to drop back into these people's lives. She felt, as she had felt before, the vague sensation that Joe had wrapped her up under his protective wing ... and her dad too, she suspected, just as Cisco and Caitlin were included too.

She and her dad had been on their own for so long. It had been just the two of them, Team Daddy-Jesse against the world. Now ...

Now her dad put an arm around her -- her weariness must have showed more than she thought. She hadn't even noticed when or how he'd managed to dislodge Caitlin. But the others trooped down to their old apartment -- well, converted lab, technically -- along with them. She knew the route so well she could probably have followed it in her sleep, but she was content to lean drowsily against her dad, while he cheerfully and aggressively continued his debate/conversation/argument with the other scientists.

Until they reached the open door of their room, and then he stopped dead and fell silent.

The room hadn't changed much. Most of the chairs were missing, and some of the scientific equipment that had slowly accumulated as her dad brought it down, but everything else appeared to be there and still in exactly the same place, so Jesse suspected they'd never moved anything at all unless it was needed elsewhere. The beds were neatly made up. She'd forgotten how small this room was for two people, how bare and utilitarian, but she was largely distracted from that by all of the balloons.

The balloons were everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and the light fixtures and every furniture frame where a balloon string could be tied. All of them were silver and black, with the S.T.A.R. labs logo, making Jesse wonder when they'd ever bothered having their own balloons made, and apparently in large quantities -- though, for all she knew, there was a machine in Cisco's workshop that printed them out. There were also streamers and crepe paper in a variety of colors that had a "hastily scrounged from around the building" kind of look.

Some small packages wrapped in clear cellophane plastic were piled on a table decorated with streamers and balloons. Jesse unlooped herself from beneath her dad's arm -- he put up no resistance -- and went to find out what they were.

"So basically we were thinking," Caitlin said behind her, as Jesse poked at the things which seemed to be small plastic-wrapped cakes of some kind, "that this is kind of a -- a combination welcome ho -- I mean, welcome back sort of thing, and also, a sort of belated -- so, look, we always used to have a little party when anybody in the lab had a birthday, including the other Dr. Wells --"

"Thawne," Cisco put in, with a hard twist of disgust on the word.

"-- Thawne, right, but anyway, when your birthday happened last year, assuming it's the same as the other Harrison's, we were sort of busy trying not to die --"

"And also pretty sure you were evil," was Cisco's contribution.

"-- yes, that too, and then for the next one you were on Earth-2, and Jesse's birthday we never got to do anything for at all, because, well, Earth-2, so --"

Jesse glanced over her shoulder to find looks of amusement deepening on the faces of the others crowding into the room behind them. Iris spoke up, leaning against Barry with her hand curled in his. "What I think they're trying to say is that this is a sort of combined birthday party and welcome back for both of you."

"And Christmas!" Cisco said, raising a pointed finger.

"Hey, Earth-1 peeps." Jesse held up one of the little plastic-wrapped cakes. "What's this?"

"Cake," Barry said immediately.

"That's not cake," her dad said, somewhat weakly. He looked stunned. She didn't think she'd ever seen him that much at a loss for words.

"Excuse you." Cisco snatched up one of the plastic-wrapped cakes and ripped the plastic off. "It's a Hostess cupcake, and it's delicious."

"We wanted to have a real welcome-back cake, but it's not as if we knew you were coming," Iris explained, leaning on Barry. "There aren't many bakeries open at midnight. We had to raid Cisco's stash of lab snacks."

"Yeah, and I hope you appreciate it," Cisco said, taking a bite. Around it, he added, "This is some quality stuff here. Come get some, before they're all gone."

There were two kinds of cakes on the table, blond and dark. They were vaguely familiar to Jesse from her months on Earth-1, but there were just so many kinds of snack food here; she couldn't remember if she'd had these before. She picked a brown one on the assumption that it was chocolate -- Earth-1 did have excellent chocolate -- and nibbled on an edge, then downed half of it in one bite.

"Yum," she said, reaching for another. The biochem major in the back of her brain quietly suggested that her body probably wanted sugar for instant energy to go along with the slow-release calories from the proteins and fats in the pizza, but mostly it was a pure jolt of sugar and chocolate that she wasn't inclined to examine too closely.

Her dad was carefully picking the plastic off one of the blond ones. Jesse grinned at him and he flashed her a quick smile back, wiping some of the boggled look off his face.

"Champagne!" Caitlin announced, coming back into the room with a bottle in her hand.

"Where'd that come from?" Joe wanted to know, eyebrows raised.

"This is _my_ private stash." She struggled with the top until Joe and Cisco converged on the bottle, one with a pocket knife, the other with something Jesse couldn't even recognize that had a dozen different attachments. Barry intervened when an argument threatened to brew: there was a quick zip of electricity, and Jesse concentrated, slowing things down so she could see what was happening. Everyone else in the room slowed as if they were moving through molasses, and she watched Barry deftly pull the knife from Joe's hand, pop out the cork, and then slip the knife back where it was, tucked between Joe's fingers. 

Barry glanced over at her, and, seeing her watching, gave her a wink. He whipped the top cup from the stack of paper cups in Caitlin's other hand and inserted it under the champagne bottle's mouth.

Then time snapped back to normal, and Joe stumbled, almost dropping the knife while Caitlin nearly dropped the open champagne bottle as the cork popped out. Barry deftly caught the surge of foam in the cup.

"You know I hate it when you do that," Joe said with an aggrieved look.

Caitlin rolled her eyes and laughed, her air of solemnity falling away as she passed the bottle to Barry and let him help her pour a small amount into each cup. Everyone was a little subdued, Jesse thought as she sat on the edge of a cot with her third snack cake of the evening. It wasn't anything to do with the party, and everything to do with ... well ... she didn't know. Maybe something bad had happened while they were gone. Maybe it was part of the changes to the timeline that Barry had made.

"Do I get one?" she asked as the cups were passed around.

"Who's underage?" was Joe's reply.

"Only for another six months," Jesse muttered.

"On _our_ Earth," her dad said, amused. "Still a year and a half here."

"Seriously?" she complained, but she gracefully accepted a cup of Coke and held it up for the toast. (This, it seemed, was the same between the Earths.) There was a brief pause while everyone searched for something to say.

"Here's to coming back," her dad said, with one of his elusive sincere smiles.

They all reached out and tapped cups, and Jesse drank. It was fizzier and sharper than the soft drinks she was used to on her Earth, and also very cold. Caitlin must have just brought it from a lab freezer. Jesse hoped it hadn't been next to anything too disgusting.

She flopped back on the cot -- the same cot she'd slept on for months when she was here before. She _knew_ it was the same. It had the same weird hump under her hips that she'd spent months squirming around, trying to find a comfortable position.

Now it was just kind of annoyingly, almost half-pleasantly familiar. She laced her hands across her chest, gazed up at the balloons, and listened with distracted attention to her dad trying to explain fourth-dimensional physics from their Earth to Cisco using snack cakes for demonstrations.

Back on their Earth, she and her dad lived in a big house with a huge spreading lawn and an acre or so of woods and gardens tucked behind a fence. It wasn't a mansion, although they could easily have afforded one, but her room alone was bigger than this one. She very distantly remembered, from her early childhood, the little suburban house they used to live in, but for most of her life she'd had space and nice things, all the latest gadgets (many of them built by her dad's company), and a cleaning lady who came in every day and kept the otherwise unoccupied rooms looking nice.

It had been great to be back home. She'd missed it desperately, missed her friends, missed her stuff. For a long time, she'd thought of this dungeonlike room as nothing better than a prison.

She tore her gaze away from the balloons and rolled over onto her side so she could see everybody: Barry and Iris sitting on her dad's cot feeding each other pieces of cake, and Caitlin giggling with Joe over Cisco's baffled/annoyed expression while her dad used snack cakes as integral components to demonstrate the new developments in dimensional field theory in the last six months.

Jesse grinned to herself and curled up on the cot and let their voices wash over her (most particularly her dad's, with its so-familiar blend of affection and irritation) until she fell asleep.


End file.
